 Hey everybody, in this video we're going to go through the special effects that we use to create our Dark Artifact Star Wars fan film. This was our first experience doing this, we did a little bit of blue screen, we did a little bit of compositing and final cut, and we learned a lot. So in this video I want to just show everybody how we made this and show you that it's really not so hard and that anybody can do this over a weekend on their own. So first off, this is about our Dark Artifact Star Wars fan film and if you haven't seen it yet I'll link it right up here for you. So I'd recommend that you go and check that out before you watch the rest of this so that this makes sense to you. So for this project we really wanted to do something very simple. We wanted to go through the entire process of writing a short story, you know creating the storyboards, filming it, editing it, putting a little bit of special effects into it, and just putting it out. We thought this was going to wind up to be like three or four minutes, it's about two minutes in the end, but that was perfect. So we actually wound up spending very little time on this, just two or three nights worth of work. So this experience has us really excited to get started on the next one. So the goal of this was to have very limited shots and very close angles so that we didn't really have to show any of the other background except for just a couple of scenes. We wanted to do this against the blue screen and make it look like we were actually in the Star Wars universe. In this section we're going to show how we created some of these outside scenes. Since we were in Florida there was some great scenery. We were by a lake with our condo, had some great trees. So we wanted to use those to make it look like our hero had just landed on an alien planet and he was looking for this Sith Temple. So of course the danger of this being in Florida is that we had to watch out for alligators. So we were very cautious about where we moved. We didn't get too close to the water. We kind of tried to stay where we could see what was going on at all times. So I just set up the Insta360 camera to film us as we were doing this so that I could have a little bit of this behind the scenes footage to share and that I would be able to match up us filming it with the actual clips that you see in the final product. So here you can see us carefully going through these trees. We do a few different takes of this. I'm only showing the takes that we actually used here. So for this we used the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. I had the Lumix 25mm f1.7 lens on that. And so with this lens on the gimbal since there's no autofocus I just have to set it to a specific focus and I have to make sure that I maintain that same distance away at all times. So we had this camera on my Moza Air 2 gimbal. That's a great gimbal for the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K and also use it for the GH5. It can handle quite a large payload but it works great with these cameras because they're pretty light as well. For the spaceship entering the planet's atmosphere and coming down into the jungle I just was pretty simple here. I just went to story blocks and I found the pieces that I needed. I already have a story blocks membership and so I use this for lots of other projects so this felt like a good fit to use it here. So obviously these are shots that we couldn't really shoot on our own and I'm not really good at 3D rendering software just yet. So this was a great fit kind of got us over the hump of how do we create this effect. And luckily there were some pre-made pieces that were already on story blocks that we could just download and use as part of my license. Not sponsored but I would not mind being sponsored story blocks. Also from story blocks we use these jungle scenes and someone had put some scenes above this Mayan Pyramid so that was perfect for our Sith Temple. So I used that, changed the color grade a little bit to make it look a little bit more like Star Wars and I think it actually worked great. So the point of this is don't be afraid to use some stock footage from somewhere else whenever you need to fill in some scenes for your short film. You don't have to shoot every bit of this to shoot the things that make the most sense for you and then use some stock footage or something that someone else has created that you have a license for to fill in the gaps. So for these scenes that we're going to use the blue screen for I did a little bit of research on blue screen versus green screen and it seems to me that blue screen is usually used whenever you want the environment to be darker and you use a green screen whenever you're going to have brighter environments. So since these situations were all either inside of the Sith Temple or inside of a spaceship I knew that I wanted them to be dark and also we have a green lightsaber that we're going to be using so we don't want to have a green screen with that. So I think the blue screen stuff worked great for our first time. I've just got one of these simple pop out green and blue reversible side screens and it worked great. It was easy to travel with and easy to set up once we got back here to get those last shots. So obviously the key is you want to have your talent separated away from the very well lit screen and then you can change the lighting on your talent for however you need it to look in the scene to match whatever background you're going to want to be using. So in this case I used a variation of lights as we were filming the different parts. So we have the one scene where the Jedi is waking up from his meditation and there's an alarm going off and I used a little light to kind of do a little bit of a flash on him at that point in time. We have another scene where he is investigating the holocron and so when he clicks it on we have a little bit of a red light that shines on his face as well as a special effect that we added with a flare to the holocron so that it looks like that light is actually illuminating him but it's actually a practical light that we used in the shot and we did the same thing with the green lightsaber as he was holding it up next to his face. We have a green light off camera that is shining on him as well and the lightsaber has a green light as well. Obviously we composited with M-saber on top of that but we have the combination of the light from his replica lightsaber as well as the off-screen green light shining on his face and his eye and then as well as the special effects that we're going to put on it and I think it makes a pretty good effect. You can actually see the gleam in his eye of the different color so for the Sith wizard parts we just did these in the condo in Florida and we just set up the blue screen in the dark with a little bit of red light and I had my other son who wore the Sith wizard outfit and do his dramatic death scene that worked out pretty great considering we just wanted that to be dark. We couldn't really do much around the scenery so we just got in really close on that shot. It's pretty tight I would have actually liked for it to be a little bit wider to be able to see more of what was going on but we just were kind of working with whatever we had. So for the interior of the spaceship we just set up right here in my studio. We have the blue screen set up. I had the Jedi spaced a little bit away from that. So for the background parts of the spaceship scenes I actually used photos that I took with my GH5 at Galaxy's Edge of various sceneries that I knew that we were going to want to use later on. So I just made sure there was nobody else around in the shot and I framed up my shots the way that I wanted them and so I have several shots like this that we could then use in our own film to composite on top of. And so another one of these I used right here for the message this is I just filmed myself against the blue screen a little bit acting like I was giving a message and then I put myself onto this little screen. So at Galaxy's Edge if you ride the Millennium Falcon ride you go through this thing where they're giving you a mission or whatever so I basically just took the same thing and this was just a photograph and then I composited myself in a hologram mode. I did the made it transparent put a glow layer on it and then shifted the skew of it so that it looked like I was kind of on the screen and kind of jittery and then I affected my voice to be able to make it sound like it was this transmission. And so I show right here in Final Cut how I layered all of these things up. So this was a pretty fun effect and actually pretty easy to do. I'll show here how I layered the different sound effects together as well as the static background shot along with my blue screen character. So then after all of that was comp together in Final Cut I actually added a handheld effect to that so that it kind of had a little bit more of a jitter to it. And I also on the internal clip had this little lens flare thing on one of the lights just to add a little bit of extra motion to it since it was just a static shot and not a video to begin with. So for the lightsaber shots I used M Saber by Motion VFX. I bought a couple of things from them on their Christmas sale actually on their Black Friday sale and then one more thing on their Christmas sale. If you're using Final Cut I highly recommend these guys they make great products. I think they only work in Final Cut at least these versions do or Final Cut and Apple Motion but that's what I use half the time anyway so that works out great for me and I get a great value out of the money for these things. And so I used the M Saber for the lightsaber effects. I had some other lightening effects that I probably got from Triune Films, Film Riot Guys on Black Friday for the lightening effect from the hands. So then we also used the Motion FX M Film Look over the entire thing to add the letter boxes and to add the off-screen flares and the color grading just to kind of make it look a little bit more cinematic as well as a little bit of film grain just to kind of add on it. I usually would do this type of thing using Film Convert and Da Vinci but for this we were just trying to do it all very quickly in Final Cut and so this was a great plug-in to use to get that full effect. It's kind of like an all in one piece. So I hope that you guys learned some stuff about this and that you're excited to go out and create your own effects. We're going to take this experience that we're gonna go from here and we're gonna make lots more stuff. This was just our very first time of doing it so we made a lot of mistakes but like I said we learned a lot of stuff as well. So stay tuned for the next experiments that we do and I hope you enjoy Dark Artifact.